What I learnt going on my honeymoon alone

I was miles away from the nearest village, somewhere in the foothills of Turkey’s Taurus Mountains, when the heavens opened. A nearby pine tree offered as much protection as an umbrella pierced with a thousand pin holes, but it was better than total saturation. So I stood beneath it, closed my eyes and drunk in the sweet smell of drenched earth.

Heavy raindrops gathered on branches and thwacked comically onto my hood. This wasn’t what the weather forecast had predicted, you know. But then again, going on a long-distance walk on my own wasn’t how I thought I would be spending my honeymoon.

Sometimes things don’t work out quite as you expect them to.

I opened the front pocket of my backpack to check that my new passport, recently given its maiden stamp by a surly Turkish immigration officer, wasn’t getting soaked. Exactly ten years before, an equally surly Morrocan immigration officer stamped my previous passport for the first time on entering the port city of Tangiers. I had hitchhiked there with a girl from my university halls, and in the decade that followed we would get many more stamps together. We would graduate, move to London, and on a winter’s night in Budapest decide to get married.